Joseph Muscat said that the Nationalists should be ashamed of a billboard they put up, the one showing him with a red face and the PM with a blue one, the former holding a red card showing 'unemployment", the latter a blue one showing the opposite.
According to Muscat, this shows that the PN in Government will be giving work only to blue-eyed boys and it should scare the electorate.
It's Muscat who should be ashamed.
To start with, his interpretation of the billboard is vacuous and shallow in the extreme. Only the smallest of Lil'Elves and strangest of Peculiar Pundits would give the interpretation Muscat gave of it and they are rabid failures who really hold to the thesis that only Nationalists got work under the PN. In reality, a region where sound-bites and slogans find little oxygen, the truth is far from that.
Muscat should be ashamed for evoking - I'm sure unconsciously, since he hasn't a racist bone in his body - the British National Front with that bill-board showing a uniformly "Aryan" (for want of a better word) group of youths with their faces emblazoned with the flag, the same flag in which proto racists disgracefully drape themselves all the time. Presumably, the smug little apparatchiks who came up with that one haven't the breadth of knowledge properly to assess their handiwork.
Muscat should be ashamed for allowing himself to descend to the facile and the glib. That is the province of bloggers and columnists, who don't aspire to be Prime Minister. Of course, with his elders, such as Evarist Bartolo, doing this all the time (Inspector Closeau anyone?) you can't really blame him, but he really should try harder, shallowness is really not an attractive trait.
I'm told, in connection with this shallowness, that Muscat demonstrated quite a bit of it on Bondi+. I didn't watch, as I was in Rome, at a most fantastic concert at the Santa Cecilia Complex, designed by Piano with an open-air performance space, so I suppose Labour'c cultural guru Zammit Tabona would be up in arms about it. It has superb indoor theatres as well, obviously, this being a city catering for many, many thousands who are prepared to pay for cultural nourishment, rather than a few hundred, if that.
Muscat should be ashamed also for his treatment of the drug-related episode at one of his party's clubs. Making slick remarks, even tongue-in-cheek, about blocks of ice doesn't cut much ice (see, when people like me make funnies, it's ok) You can understand Muscat wanting to protect his Deputy Leader, bearing in mind George Bernard Shaw's aphorism, but there are limits and aspirant PMs would do well to recognise them.
What else should Muscat be ashamed of, you may well ask.
How about that with which Martin Scicluna charged him on Wednesday? Putting out an electoral manifesto, road map, wish list or whatever which is supposed to be a mix of sound and original ideas but which actually has ideas which are either totally unoriginal or (equally) unsound is quite an achievement, but certainly not one of which to be proud.